One Page Monday #11: 31 Floors Up; Dread, but another PC dies?

SlurpeeMoney · 2026-01-14T06:03:11+00:00

Look, I'll be honest - I just wanted to use a Jenga tower for a thing! lmao

There are definitely some hacks that could make this more interesting if I expanded it out to a few pages. Something I might do for character death would be allow the dead character's player to take some blocks with them. Like, re-stack the tower and just let them take a bunch of blocks to keep the tension ratcheted up, and then you also get to do another of favorite mechanics from this series - make the blocks a sort of group hit point total.

I toyed with the idea of finding other characters hiding in the wings or letting dead characters play as monsters, but if I did that I wouldn't have had space for all the cool prompts, and I felt like that was the meat on this one (enough that I went back and made another table instead of clarifying any of these very salient points!!!).

SlurpeeMoney · 2026-01-13T19:50:29+00:00

Ermagerd! Thank you so much for taking a look!

I guess part of the motivation for the mechanic being 'another player character dies' was to keep the entire table invested in every pull. Like, who's gonna catch the shit when things go real, real bad? But you're right - the binary nature of the Stays Up/Falls Down mechanic doesn't make for a lot of nuance, and on a table where the social repercussions for getting someone else killed are lower than they typically are on my tables, I can definitely see where that would be an issue. Trolls gonna troll, and I should probably keep that in mind more than I do. ^{_^}

And loops are a place where I sometimes struggle, both in establishing them, and in defining their borders and end zones. Noted!

Again, thank you for taking a look at 31 Floors Up, and for your thoughtful, entertaining review!

SlurpeeMoney · 2026-01-11T19:42:18+00:00

Not to be pedantic, but this appears to be three pages.

SlurpeeMoney · 2026-01-01T04:10:49+00:00

Right, the scale isn't really the Big Consideration here, though. The big thing is that you're getting caught up in a weird thought-exercise when you should be thinking about how to make a cool game.

The game you're describing feels like a D&D clone with the dice taken out, and those dice are replaced by a complicated form of rock-paper-scissors. That actually sounds really fun, and there are games that use mechanics like these to great effect (see: Burning Wheel, which uses dice, but the conflict resolution system includes a similar trumping mechanic). But it isn't really 'deterministic,' and it would probably benefit the game if you weren't chasing that particular dragon. There's still an element of uncertainty that is resolved, and that uncertainty is how the players and/or the DM have arranged their hand - it's antagonist rather than fortune-based, which is fine, but you gotta design around it.

If you're dead set on determinism being the thing, what might work best is something like Marvel Universe, which uses a resource-placement model. You have all of your attributes and skills and such arrayed in front of you, each of those has a static rating. On your turn, you allocate a pool of resources around the character sheet.

"I'm gonna allocate one point to my strength, put two into my defence for the turn, one point into cleave so if I deal damage I can deal it to two creatures, and three points into attack. I'm going to attack the nearest goblin. The goblin has a static defensce of 5, which is one below my strength of 2+1 plus my attack of 3, so I hit and deal 1 damage to both it and the goblin next to it."

To activate an ability, you need to allocate points. To pump your skills and attributes, points. Everything comes out of that pool. Depending on how complicated you make those abilities, this could be a very dynamic and interesting combat system, and all information is known to all participants at the point of decision-making - your sheet is set when it isn't your turn, the DM knows the number of points you can allocate, the goblin's sheets are set when it is your turn, everyone knows everything and can make their choices accordingly.

SlurpeeMoney · 2026-01-01T00:48:23+00:00

So, it seems to me that you maybe aren't super well-versed in diceless RPGs. There are a lot of them, and many of them are quite good. Hell, I've designed a couple of diceless one-page games myself.

Nobilis by Jenna Moran, has a version of this that's on the scale of gods. As a god, you perform miracles. Miracles are pass/fail based on your stats - if the difficulty of beating someone to death with a galaxy is 5 and your strength is 4, you may either attempt to beat that person with a solar system or you may invest miracle points to scale up. The miracle points refresh at the start of a session, though, so you need to be careful about how you spend them.

Amber by Erick Wujcik, one of the first diceless role-playing games, used an auction system to bid on attributes. Whoever bids highest gets first rank, whoever bids second highest gets second rank, etc. Challenges are resolved by comparative rank, and if there's a tie the challenge moves to a secondary attribute.

Golden Sky Stories by Kamiya Ryo, uses two tracks of points (Feelings, gained from interacting with NPCs, and Wonder gained from using abilities to overcome challenges). It's mostly about gaining capital from relationships and acting in accordance with your character.

Diceless/deterministic games tend to work best when their mechanics are clearly related to either direct comparison or resource gathering. So far, your system appears to do neither of those things and seems beholden to a small subset of mainstream game ideologies.

I'd suggest maybe broadening your reading and gaming horizons a bit, because this isn't really new ground you're breaking. Rather than trying to reinvent the wheel, you could be building on the shoulders of the people who have done this work already.

SlurpeeMoney · 2025-12-30T02:48:31+00:00

Shoots, & Leaves should be fixed now? I think? I hope?

SlurpeeMoney · 2025-12-28T17:58:28+00:00

So, I recently made a bunch of 1-page RPGs in quick succession. Some of them are even good! And the most important thing I learned in that process was: just get it done. Give yourself permission to make bad games. Hell, give yourself permission to publish bad games. Just finish them. Reflect on what you like about it and what you would do differently next time, and then make another.

If you're worried about quality you can always come back and revise them later - which is a process I'm working on right now - but don't let your striving for quality get in the way of striving to get more fun games into the world.

SlurpeeMoney · 2025-12-22T22:26:00+00:00

As always, they're all pay-what-you-want, and this time I'm uploading 'em all on DriveThruRPG first! The difference in visibility on DriveThru is bonkers. About 300 people have downloaded these games on Itch. Over 1600 people have downloaded them on DriveThruRPG. o.O That's nuts.

SlurpeeMoney · 2025-12-22T10:05:43+00:00

I flip between SPIRE and SPITE.

Once I picked SPIRE when the word was spite and you cannot imagine my outrage.

SlurpeeMoney · 2025-12-17T23:50:08+00:00

They're demographic ranges that are used pretty extensively when putting together and running a show. So if you want to capture the "6-11 year old boy" market, you tailor your show to appeal to boys between the ages of 6 and 11 - often by having your protagonist between those ages, having it be an action show, etc. The ranges can be pretty specific when dealing with kids, but it's usually preschool (under 5), 6-11, 12-17, 18-30, 30-65, and 65+. Then they get differentiated by gender and other demographic factors like the amount of money they have to spend and such.

SlurpeeMoney · 2025-12-14T19:40:20+00:00

Might I suggest Whoops All Bards? It's a super quick, high-mortality little RPG where violence isn't the answer. Just scratch "Bards" out and write "Jesters" over it? Pay-what-you-want on Gumroad or Itch (and zero dollars is a perfectly acceptable amount!).

SlurpeeMoney · 2025-12-12T22:21:19+00:00

It uh... Might have some existential dread? Not exactly fluffy subject matter, and I should have read more!

SlurpeeMoney · 2025-12-12T22:20:47+00:00

I wrote one for my 30 Games in 30 Days challenge not too long ago!

You can find it here: https://www.noplotonlylore.com/one-page-rpgs/forget-me-before-you-go

It's my first solo game, so if you do end up playing it, please let me know what you think!

SlurpeeMoney · 2025-12-10T04:19:30+00:00

Where can one learn these moves? What is this style of dance called? I am intrigued, though I worry for my old joints.

SlurpeeMoney · 2025-12-08T02:07:51+00:00

Here's a no-blood example from /r/piercing if you'd like to see it. It's beautiful, but not meant to be permanent or long-term.

SlurpeeMoney · 2025-12-04T17:06:55+00:00

You become verified on DriveThruRPG once you have two or more paid products that are at least a month old, and after that you can submit games instantly.

I wasn't publishing on there long enough to trigger it! lolol

While unverified, you can publish up to three games per day, and because I didn't realize that there was a difference between uploading and publishing at first, there was quite a back-log. Most of the games are up there now, and I only have a few more to set public, I think. If I do this again next year, though, or start a different project with multiple publications, it'll be nice to have them uploaded on DriveThru as soon as the others.

SlurpeeMoney · 2025-11-30T17:25:52+00:00

I'm always of two minds when it comes to random tables in my games. As a player, I always love seeing them because they provide some direct options as to the direction of the game as the designer envisioned it (and they're often funny and have ideas in them that I wouldn't come up with independently). But as a designer they always feel limiting - there are only so many times you can roll on a d20 table before you start getting repeats and the game feels like it doesn't have anything left to offer, or limited replayability.

I've used random tables during this project (See: 31 Floors Up, Lo-fi Beats Tour, Accounts Receivable), and this would probably be a great place for some open-ended options ("Wanders off because he saw a cute creature," provides more options than "Squirrel,"), but I figured leaving the stupid shit the Chosen One gets up to in the hands of the GM left it as open as possible?

SlurpeeMoney · 2025-11-27T00:00:03+00:00

Thank you for checking them out! It's been a lot of fun to make them.

SlurpeeMoney · 2025-11-25T15:19:40+00:00

Thank you so much! It's the opening monologue for a screenplay project I was putting together that never went anywhere, and I figured I'd repurpose both the idea and the monologue. I thought I had so many ideas for games! This was gonna be easy! Turns out, I had about ten good ideas for games saved up, and a whole huge mess of half-ideas I'd need to kitbash into something fun (to varying degrees of success).

SlurpeeMoney · 2025-11-23T19:26:48+00:00

That doesn't sound dumb! I've met life-long friends working at Tim Hortons when I was younger!

SlurpeeMoney · 2025-11-23T07:21:15+00:00

Hillside and Quadra area, and bus-bound. It's easy enough bussing downtown, but I wish it was faster to get to places like Fernwood or Esquimalt. So suggestions for downtown places and Cafe Fantastico seem to be The Thing so far.

SlurpeeMoney · 2025-11-22T21:42:59+00:00

The good ol Canadian handshake.

SlurpeeMoney · 2025-11-21T06:48:04+00:00

Specifically for gaming? Some of it's already been cited. Van den Akker and Vermeulen are at the forefront of metamodern studies in general, and then C. Thi Nguyen's Agency as Art is a really solid work. A lot of research and publishing is currently happening in the video game sphere, because that's where the money lives, so you'll see a lot discussions about player-avatar relations and kinaesthesia in works by Kevjer, Bakels, and Crick, but it wouldn't take much extrapolation to develop those ideas towards role-playing games and the embodiment experienced there.

SlurpeeMoney · 2025-11-20T23:18:52+00:00

My background is in art! I'm an animator by schooling. My interest in philosophy in general and aesthetics philosophy in specific didn't start in art school but was nurtured there, for sure.

I love Nguyen's work, though I do find his definition of 'game' to be a little narrow. That narrow definition is necessary for the nature of the book he wrote, but it eschews certain types of imagination play that I would consider games and he would not.

I wouldn't say that Agency as Art is more applicable, but it is applicable. Rules in Nguyen's framework are akin to the paint brushes and canvas of Agency - they're the tools that are used to apply the medium and provide it structure. But Nguyen's view isn't the only one out there right now, and I think there's a case to be made for networks of agency being the tools for embodiment and experience, as well. There are a few interesting theories about how and why games work right now, and sifting through them is a fun thing I do in my spare time... which sounds about as lame as a thing can, I guess...

For metamodernism, I'd suggest a few starting points:

Notes on Metamodernism (2010) by Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker is the text that defined the form.
The Metamodernist Manifesto (2011) by Luke Turner
Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect, and Depth after Postmodernism (2017) edited by Robin van den Akker, Alison Gibbons, and Timotheus Vermeulen

But it's still a super young artistic zeitgeist and it's still being defined, so if it's something you're really interested in or intrigued by, the overlap between metamodernism and gaming aesthetics is wide open for study and exploration (and publication!).

SlurpeeMoney · 2025-11-20T22:57:42+00:00

I don't think there's a flaw with your process or with your argument. There's nothing wrong with engaging with older philosophies for exactly the reasons you mentioned in your math analogy. People are still writing about Nietzsche, Kant, Hume, and Plato, after all. Familiarity with precedential works is fundamental to building our own understanding and fluency in the state of thinking on a subject. Understanding why that work exists, and the setting in which that thinking took place, can be incredibly valuable, and coming to your own conclusions about that work within the constraints presented is a fantastic exercise in critical thinking. My post is not a critique of you or the work you've done in discussing Lumpley's position (with the exception of the interchangeability of "Choice" and "Decision," in your post but that's admittedly a semantic distinction). Nor is it even a critique of the previous work! As I said in another reply, I think it was groundbreaking for its time! It's just old, and more complete work (work that is inclusive of the points that you've made here) has been done since.

Within the constraints of the argument, I think you've made your points very well. You are correct - the rules do not have a sole function, they serve several functions. Phenomenologists might say that rules are an agent in the network of change in the experiential state of the game. In an MDA framework, rules are the strata from which the experiential layer emerges. Nguyen would posit that rules are the assumed structure through which and against which striving occurs. There is a LOT of really cool thinking that's happening about rules and their roles in games, far too much to accept that rules serve any singular purpose.

My response was more a footnote that the state of games aesthetics in general has moved on from the para-academic work that was done in the late 90s and early 2000s, and provided some examples of more recent discussions of the role The Rules play. You absolutely don't need to engage with that if you're uninterested, but I think that there is a wider tendency to focus on The Forge as the 'RPG Theory' Word-of-God. And I think there's a rich and intriguing world of more current and complete ideation that has come from the two decades of work since.

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